Art for Art's Ache
My output of bibliolages recently might have seemed slow to one who knows my history, but that is because I have been working on such a huge project that it has taken nearly two years to finish, and it is so large that it is difficult to convey with a few pictures. The work began with an exceptionally well-produced book by and about and of Marjorie Goodson. It is 16.5 inches high and 12.5 inches wide. Most of the pictures in it are photographs that spread over the right and left pages, and they have no margins, so the images are 16.5” x 25” with eye-dazzling color. The book came out in 2023 and retailed for $125. I picked up a shopworn copy for $50 at our local bookstore, Chaucer’s.
Goodson is a trained ballet/jazz dancer and model, who grew up in the posh world of Hollywood. Her father co-produced The Price Is Right, The Match Game, Beat the Clock, Concentration, and many other game shows from the 1950s into the 1980s. Marjorie was a “prize model” on Concentration. After her children were grown, she looked for a way to channel her creative spirit as well as the superb physique she worked hard to preserve. What came of that was a kind of performance art in collaboration with the photographer Andreea Radutoiu. Two books have come of this, the first in 2017 and the second in 2023, at which point MG (as she terms herself) was pushing sixty years old.
Not that you can tell. The photographs reveal her, literally, in the most extravagant poses, often slathered with paint, jumping, contorting, emoting. She describes her art as “electric, fierce, and slightly futuristic.” I would add expressionistic, as her intensity comes right through your eyeballs and into your mind. Her motto is “All in, not all over.”
The backgrounds range from studio neutral to the wildly fantastic, but with plenty of empty space to suggest where I might step in. Do I dare? From the first, I was daunted. Just handling this 10-pound book was challenging, and the production values are so strong and so high-end that I felt unsure how to respond. She works with a stylist, costume and lighting designer, a make-up artist, and a book designer, as well as the photographer, Radutoiu, who comes from the world of European fashion photography.
And then there’s me in my Land’s End pants and today (no exaggeration) a button-down shirt I got at Costco for about $15 (well, two for $29.99). On certain days, I feel much closer to “all over” than “all in.” And yet I felt up for the challenge. I don’t usually pay $50 for any book I am going to massacre, but somehow there I was handing over my credit card.
The first challenge was scale. My collage cutting is usually on a microscopic scale. What I love is how the tiniest detail can suddenly reread an image in a surprising way. But on certain pages of this book a sledge hammer might be scarcely noticeable. So, I spent more than a year collecting cuttable books that might stand a chance of registering, and they are not that easy to find in the junk shops I favor. I needed the kind of coffee table books that demand a reinforced coffee table.
Then, too, Goodson’s works are eclectic in their styles and statements, so no one source or even category of imagery was going to do the trick. I needed a shelf of books, and ultimately more than 20 came to bear, and many of those were diverse (and inclusive–not so sure about equitable). To offset the in-your-face eroticism of some of Goodson’s images, I needed maximally sombre and over-dressed imagery.
I spent another half of a year cutting out likely inclusions, but only provisionally. By then, I knew Goodson’s leaps and bounds, and I required bounding and leapage of my stock. Where was I going with her art?
Where, indeed? I had immediately picked up that her statement was extravagant–on a different path or way–and art-infused. There was no mistaking these images for a walk in the park or a family portrait. She strove to exceed the commonplace human in motion and dynamism and color and form, but with a sense of beauty that comes from what the human form can do–how it can cut and curve. Her imagery is sexy and artsy and mad. It swirls around space and time so dynamically that you wonder how you ever identified anything as still or set. Its weirdness puts in question any memory of the ordinary or banal.
What did that suggest to me? I thought immediately of the horniness of the baroque and the ecstasies of religion. Those things meshed, and they gave us so much of what we reserve under the title of art. If we detect some precursor manifestation in ancient art or some lingering trace in the modern, the word “art” holds those together as a term for what we feel in the spirit of compulsive creativity. All in, not all over, in fact.
So I looked for art that aimed to exceed in order to make my entrance into the mise-en-scène of Goodson. Art alone was not sufficient, since it is nature that has done the most astonishing dance, so of course I needed orchids, those prima donnas of the floral world, also exotic sea creatures, both shelled and spiny. I needed elephants. I needed woodworkers, who make carved wood flow, and the same goes for stone. I needed Leonardo and Matisse, but also the anonymous decorators of history.
I kept putting off the moment when I would glue in anything, until at last, maybe five months ago, I could hold off no longer. By then, I had a great stock of things to apply somewhere, but the moment had arrived when glue would settle the question of where–and why. Recent months have seen the ups and downs. Often I have gone off to find something I did not think I needed, while piles of stuff that proved useless have grown.
Along the way, I was trying to figure out what this bibliolage is about, and that is, obviously, art in all its elusiveness. Goodson’s quest is to embody art–to become a piece of art–over and over again, in as many ways as possible. But it’s all in the spirit of self, and self is, like art (?), finally, a dated concept. The terms of art, like the terms of ego, arose in a world that understood the sense of a higher purpose, whether it was God or immortality or monarchy or ideals like beauty and perfection or romantic notions like transcendence or love. What I see in Goodson’s work (that is, the work of MG and her team) is lacking all of that–sadly, pathetically, achingly. Oscar Wilde paradoxically marked the endpoint of that, even as he promoted “art for art’s sake.” On this point of reflection, I woke up one morning with the appropriate title: Art for Art’s Ache.
In keeping with much of what we have taken for art in the past century, Goodson’s art is mostly package and hardly any substance, not unlike the game shows fostered by her father and the stuff she helped sell on Concentration. There is enough there to keep you from turning the channel, but nothing more. In its way, her book is a masterpiece of artifice and a parody of advertising. It celebrates the superficial. It exalts the human skin as canvas. It portrays a grotesque waste of paint and a splatter of style. (The panties ruined! The wigs to be tossed! The clean-up on aisle zero!) Goodson’s book is the diametric opposite of a Paris runway show, as it begs the question: Why not just be naked and be done with it?
Every publication is an act of self-publication, as this book apparently is. (I can’t find it on Amazon, which I take as a good sign.) It should perhaps be only in the hands of someone who can offer a strong sense of irony, and my pictorial commentary on it only compounds the message of art as an extravagant waste, which I perpetuated. I put a couple dozen books in the recycling bin once I had extracted the collage material. Talk about ache!
And yet it just seemed to need to be done. Doggone it!
The final problem was that the book is so vast and unwieldy that it would not fit on my flatbed scanner. I used my phone to get these images, but with inevitable distortions. As usual with bibliolages, but especially in this case, you really want to be handling the actual book, and its thick pages are a pleasure to turn.
Let me know, and we can set up an opportunity for you to try it out.
